And then there were three

After Tuesday’s primary results, which ended the race for the Republican nomination and prolonged that for the Democratic nod, the three remaining campaigns must re-examine their strategies.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton finally found a formula that worked for her after a month of losses: pressing Obama on the economy and his readiness to lead. Will it be enough to sustain her momentum?

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Sen. Barack Obama will need a new strategy to defend his narrow delegate margin. He might throw Clinton’s attacks on his experience right back at her.

And Sen. John McCain is sitting pretty after four more wins and the surrender of his remaining key competitor, Mike Huckabee. But he won’t just sit around until August, and he won’t just stay in red states, either.

Hillary Rodham Clinton

By Ben Smith

For Hillary Rodham Clinton, the mantra coming out of Tuesday’s primary victories is more of the same.

After posting convincing — and crucial — wins in Rhode Island, Ohio and Texas, the New York senator plans to march toward a strong showing in Pennsylvania on April 22 by continuing to ask pointed questions about Illinois Sen. Barack Obama’s qualifications to lead the nation.

Clinton is preparing to press her attacks on Obama’s commitment to economic populism and his readiness to serve as commander in chief. Those arguments also will be used to make a case that is crucial to Clinton’s ultimate ability to win the nomination — the idea that she can win in tough, large-scale elections in key states, notably Ohio, and that Obama is wilting in the face of her attacks.

“This is not a question of trying to damage somebody,” Clinton adviser Harold Ickes told reporters on a conference call Wednesday. “We think that [Clinton] has been vetted for the last 15 years — there’s not another shoe in her closet to drop. It is clear that too much is yet unknown about Sen. Obama.”

But Clinton also faces obstacles, and not just the daunting mathematics of overcoming Obama’s delegate lead.

She faces a series of detours over the next seven weeks, challenges posed by two smaller state contests that Obama is favored to win (Wyoming and Mississippi) and by a likely new round of examinations of her White House years and her family finances.

Meanwhile, she’ll be pressing the case that Obama deserves more examination as well and reveling in the federal corruption trial in Chicago of his former political ally Antoin “Tony” Rezko.

“We’re not going to leave any state uncontested. We’re not going to bypass any state,” Ickes said, adding that the campaign would compete for “our share of the delegates, whether or not we win.”

Clinton essentially skipped a round of caucuses in states such as Idaho and Alaska on Feb. 5, hoping victories in larger states would end the race.

Now she has five staffers on the ground in Wyoming, where caucuses take place Saturday and where 18 delegates are at stake. Bill Clinton will make three stops there Thursday, and local supporters are trying to arrange a visit from the candidate herself Friday, said Kathy Karpan, a former Democratic candidate for Wyoming governor who is one of Clinton’s leading supporters in the state.

“I think we can win,” Karpan said, citing “the connection that the Clintons have with people in our state,” a network of support built during their White House years, when they vacationed at Jackson Hole.

“We are going to do very well with the rank and file,” Karpan said. “The question is, will those people who get captivated by e-mails” — Obama supporters — “be willing to sit through the call to order, the nominating and seconding speeches. It takes a little bit of patience and interest in the process to do this,” she said.

Clinton has no ads on the air in Wyoming, though, Karpan said.

She’s also spending little money on the March 11 primary in Mississippi, where 40 delegates are at stake.

Clinton has opened a campaign office in Jackson, and one of her senior aides, Burns Strider — a Mississippi native — is on the ground in the state, along with other staff.

Clinton plans to visit Mississippi on Thursday, and Bill Clinton is also being dispatched Friday for stops in Hattiesburg, Meridian and Tupelo — but even her most devout supporters have no illusions that she can win the state. Her campaign there is far less visible than Obama’s, and the sheer demographics of the race — 56 percent of Democratic primary voters in 2004 were African-American, according to exit polls — mean that her aides can at best hope to narrow her margin of defeat.

The seven week lead-up to Pennsylvania will also offer the press time to return to some troublesome topics for Clinton that got lost in the tightly packed weeks before March 4. Recent reports on everything from Bill Clinton’s business and charitable dealings in Kazakhstan to Hillary Clinton’s representation of an alleged rapist as a lawyer in Arkansas have brought new information to the table, much of which hasn’t been fully digested.

The conservative law firm Judicial Watch announced recently that the National Archives has indicated that more than 10,000 pages of the then-first lady’s White House schedule will be ready for release March 20 — which could prompt either flattering reminders of her experience or embarrassing stories on what she was spending her time on.

Clinton has also promised to release her tax returns on or around April 15, which will prompt detailed examinations of her husband’s private income since leaving the White House.

But while she defends herself on those fronts, Clinton’s victories in Ohio and Texas proved that she has finally learned to land punches on Obama. Advisers said they plan to continue two clear lines of attack: raising questions about his readiness to serve as commander in chief and painting him as insincere on economics by raising an adviser’s reported assurances to the Canadian government that he would not radically alter the North American Free Trade Agreement, which is unpopular with Democratic primary voters.

Obama has denied being disingenuous about NAFTA, but Clinton aides feel that denial has not defused the issue. The NAFTA discussion “seriously undercuts what Sen. Obama’s campaign is saying,” Clinton strategist Mark Penn said on the conference call Wednesday. It would, he said, “continue to be an issue.”

As the feuding and bloodletting in the Democratic race continue for at least seven more weeks, John McCain will use the time to stock his war chest, travel abroad, begin to roll out policy proposals and try to make the case that he can draw votes in states where Republicans have traditionally feared to tread.

First, though, he’ll go back to where it all began and hold what aides are billing as the first town hall meeting of the general election in New Hampshire. At a town hall meeting in Exeter next Wednesday, he’ll meet with and thank the voters who first propelled him to stardom in 2000 and then resurrected his White House hopes in January.

By going to New Hampshire, McCain’s campaign wants to also send the message that it plans on competing on turf that has not been friendly to Republicans of late. John F. Kerry won the Granite State in 2004, and it turned a deep shade of blue in the 2006 midterm elections.

Immediately following his New Hampshire trek, McCain will head overseas on a 10-day congressional delegation trip to Europe and the Middle East that will coincide with the Senate’s spring recess.

After returning on Easter Sunday — March 23 — McCain will deliver a major speech that week detailing his observations from the trip.

Soon after will come a campaign tour meant to highlight McCain’s unique background and his family’s illustrious history of military service.

“We’ll set about introducing John McCain to the American public, telling his story and tying it to the future,” an aide said.

He’ll begin in Meridian, Miss. — the native state of his father’s side of the family — where the airfield at the naval air station is named after his admiral grandfather and namesake.

After the this-is-your-life trip, McCain will set off on what one aide called a “different kind of Republican tour.” Plans on where McCain will visit are still being made, but the message sent by his stops and venues will be that he plans to campaign in areas that Republicans traditionally haven’t bothered with.

Aides say McCain is serious about expanding, even destroying, the red/blue map paradigm, and this tour will underscore that intent. One possibility could be visiting inner cities to show he wants to attract minority votes.

As the spring goes on, McCain will turn to laying out specific policy proposals and begin to offer the sort of contrasts on domestic and foreign policy that his advisers hope to spotlight this summer and fall.

“We’ll start framing the choice in this race,” said an aide.

Woven throughout will be as many fundraisers as they can squeeze onto the schedule, some of which may not include the candidate himself.

McCain will spend part of a week in California later this month, mining the cash-rich state in both big cities and smaller areas such as Riverside County, where he’ll hold a fundraiser in Palm Desert on March 24.

He’s also got fundraisers on tap in other major cities throughout the country where there is much untapped cash to be had for the presumptive GOP nominee: Atlanta, New Orleans, Phoenix, St. Louis, New York, Boston, Chicago and Las Vegas.

While he’s on the road raising cash, his staff will begin taking over the Republican National Committee and developing McCain’s voter contact operation while also bringing on additional aides to his Arlington, Va., headquarters.

Fresh from his losses in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island, Obama previewed a harder-hitting approach Wednesday against Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton that must thread the needle between his promise to run a post-partisan campaign and the need to run aggressively against an opponent who just proved that attacking him works.

After two days of rest in Chicago, Obama will go first to Wyoming, which holds caucuses Saturday, and then to Mississippi, where voters head to the polls March 11.

But it was clear from the earliest exchanges following Tuesday’s primary election that both campaigns were looking beyond the next two states to the April 22 contest in Pennsylvania, where the candidates have six weeks to woo voters in a state that has never seen such attention in the midst of a primary fight.

David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, said the senator would campaign hard in Pennsylvania but it wouldn’t be his sole focus in the coming weeks. Obama will also spend time in Indiana and North Carolina, which do not vote until May 6.

Obama and his aides appear to be rolling out a two-pronged attack on Clinton: one on her foreign policy credentials and the other on ethics.

He told reporters on his plane before leaving San Antonio that Clinton must back up her experience argument with evidence.

“I know she talks about visiting 80 countries,” he said. “It was not clear — was she negotiating treaties or agreements? Was she handling crises during this period of time? My sense is the answer is no. I haven’t seen any evidence that she is better-equipped to handle a crisis. If your criteria are longevity in Washington, then she is not going to beat John McCain on that.”

Just as his chief strategist, David Axelrod, hinted Tuesday, Obama also sought to draw a brighter line with Clinton on ethics issues. After taking hits in the past week over his relationship with a Chicago businessman currently on trial on federal corruption charges, Obama said she would lose a fight over ethics.

“She has made the argument that she is thoroughly vetted. I think it is important to examine that argument,” Obama said. “If the suggestion [is] that on issues of ethics or disclosure or transparency, that she is somehow going to have a better record than I have or could better withstand Republican attack, then that is an issue that should be tested.”

“Over the coming weeks, we will join her in that argument,” he added.

Soon after the traveling press corps touched down in Chicago, the campaign had blasted a memo to reporters with the headline: “TAX RETURNS: What does Clinton have to hide?” The Obama campaign has been pressing Clinton to release her 2006 tax returns.

“There is no reason she cannot release her 2006 tax returns. Talk about change you can Xerox. You can Xerox your tax returns,” Axelrod said on a conference call. “She has been a habitual nondiscloser on this and other issues.”

Howard Wolfson, Clinton’s communications director, said the records would be released “on or around April 15.”

Obama will benefit from having six weeks to introduce himself to voters in Pennsylvania, a state where he has spent little time. By contrast, the Clintons have deep institutional and political ties to the state.

An Obama spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, said the campaign has not yet scheduled a trip to Pennsylvania because, for now, it is focused on Wyoming and Mississippi. But one will be planned soon, she said.

The campaign has opened five offices so far in the state, Psaki said.

The demographics of Pennsylvania — rural and blue-collar communities squeezed between two large cities — resemble those of Ohio, where Clinton scored one of her best showings of the primary season.

Obama dismissed the suggestion that he could fare as poorly in Pennsylvania as he did in Ohio.

“They said that about Wisconsin, and we won by 18 points,” Obama said. “So every state is different. I don’t buy into this demographic argument.”

And then he quickly tried to steer reporters’ attention back to the next two states on the board.

“It is very important not to focus on a handful of states because the Clintons say those states are important and the other states are unimportant,” Obama said. “If we win Mississippi and Wyoming, that is important. If we end up winning North Carolina, that is important. This notion that somehow all the states I win are not bellwether states, but the states Sen. Clinton wins are the critical ones, is a strange way of keeping score and I don’t think makes much sense.”